Pelquin's Comet

by Ian Whates

  This was an age of expansion, of hot heads and burning ambition, of genuinely heroic deeds sprinkled among the far more numerous foolish and ill-conceived ones. Mankind was stretching out to claim the stars, his reach greatly boosted by caches of ancient technology left behind by the Elders – an advanced civilisation which seemed to have abandoned this sector of the galaxy centuries ago. Not for her to speculate as to why they’d abandoned so much intriguing and useful tech, she left such matters to wiser heads with different priorities. Not that every cache held significant finds, of course; some proved to contain no more than baubles and trinkets, but even these were highly valued. The lack of an apparent pattern was frustrating to say the least – her job would have been so much easier if each haul was identical – but any cache was worth retrieving.

  Then, of course, there were the guardian entities: programmed intelligences left behind by the Elders to protect the caches; or, at least, to protect some of them. Again, no one had yet figured out a way to predict whether a guardian was likely to be in situ or not; and that was a decidedly telling variable, since the guardians had proved to be tenacious, ingenious, and often deadly.

  There was no doubting, though, that this was a good time to be a banker. Cache hunting had ignited the imagination of a generation, inspiring men and women to gamble on finding that elusive pot of gold at the end of a xenological rainbow. The pursuit of their dreams, successful or otherwise, required many things: dedication, faith, self-belief, courage, knowledge, resourcefulness, a dollop or two of good fortune and, above all… money. Which, of course, was where she came in.

  Terry Reese saw her position as one of great privilege and responsibility. She and those like her were retained by the banks to separate the diamonds from the rubble, to decide which proposals merited support and which were black holes waiting to suck in funds without any prospect of a return. The substantial salary she received was merely a reflection of her success in making the right choices and the privileged lifestyle she enjoyed no more than just reward.

  Of course, some cases were easier to assess than others.

  The first person who had come to see her that morning with begging bowl in hand, for example, had required a judgement that was simplicity itself. A naïve rich kid with stars in his eyes and little more behind them. His family had grown wealthy on manufacturing a small but essential component of stardrive engines and he had more than enough credit to finance his own expedition should he wish to.

  She still wasn’t entirely sure why he had presented himself before her at all. Was it simply because he’d heard that the first thing you did when venturing forth in search of Elder artefacts was visit the bank manager, or because he had so little faith in this proposal that he didn’t want to risk his own family’s money on the venture? She suspected the former, doubting he was canny enough for the latter, not when fired up with the sort of zeal he’d demonstrated here today.

  As it was, Terry had to resist the temptation to slap him down and tell him to go away and grow up. That would hardly have been the most diplomatic approach, bearing in mind the influence his family wielded. So instead she had smiled and let him down gently, explaining that unfortunately there wasn’t enough substance to his proposal for her to commit the bank’s support at this stage, suggesting that he should go away and conduct more research in order to bolster his arguments and present a stronger case. Once he’d done that, she assured him she would be happy to reconsider the situation, in, say, six months’ time? By then, hopefully, his enthusiasm would have waned and his attention wandered on to some new project; preferably one that wouldn’t bring him into her presence again.

  Her second appointment had been a different matter entirely: a mother, desperate to mount an expedition to find her missing son. The lad had been crew on a ship that disappeared while on a cache hunt. To be specific, he’d disappeared while in search of Lenbya. Terry groaned inwardly when she heard this. If she had a credit for every time she’d heard that name, she could have retired a rich woman by now. The name was said to derive from the corruption of a word in the Elder language itself, which was patently ridiculous; no other Elder word had survived to Terry’s knowledge, so why this one? Lenbya was nothing more than a deep space fable, the so called ‘Ultimate Cache of the Elders’, said to put every other cache to shame. Discovered by an ancient spacer who had never been able to find the place again, Lenbya’s legend had become part of the whole Elder mythos, taking hold of the public imagination. Like El Dorado, Paititi, the Seven Cities of Gold and even Atlantis before it – Terry had made a study of such ancient Earth-borne myths in her youth, when she had still harboured secret hopes of discovering the ultimate cache herself – Lenbya had become a romantic goal and irresistible lure for the foolish and the gullible. As such, it was the bane of the older, wiser, and more cynical Terry’s professional life.

  Even so, she managed to smile compassionately with this obviously distraught woman, and even felt a degree of sympathy for the applicant, which surprised her. The woman at least possessed enough sense to do her homework and brought a well-constructed proposal to the meeting, built not around the missing son but rather around the hoard of Elder artefacts the son’s ship had been searching for, which might or might not have been the ever-elusive Lenbya itself.

  Unfortunately, inevitably, there was simply too little to go on. Calculations, carried out as the woman spoke and taking into account everything she presented, suggested no better than a 17% chance of actually finding the cache, any cache, which made the proposed trip financially unviable. Much as Terry might have liked to help, she couldn’t, not with that sort of success profile.

  The woman was gracious in her disappointment, which made it worse; almost as if she’d been resigned to hearing just such a response from the outset but had felt compelled to go through the motions and at least try, for her son’s sake. Terry ushered her out with genuine regret, doubting that the day’s third applicant would be anywhere near as brave or deserving. Not that such factors could be allowed to influence her judgement.

  Even in the 3D file images displayed before her, this Pelquin character possessed a certain rakish charm. Stockily built, with a roundish face – the sort that carried the passing years deceptively lightly – dark hair cropped short, as most spacers favoured. He was far from handsome in any classical sense, yet there was something undeniably appealing about him. He had the air of a naughty schoolboy who had never quite grown out of the rebellious stage but instead developed into a loveable rogue. Perhaps it was the way his eyes stared straight at you in each of the three images, as if challenging the viewer to criticise. There was no ambiguity in those clear dark depths, which seemed to say: ‘this is me. Live with it’.

  She sighed, wondering if the man himself would live up to the image her fancy was building of him. Certainly Pelquin’s record was colourful enough to fulfil the ‘loveable rogue’ tag. Little was known about his early years – there was nothing on file about his parents and family, or even his planet of origin – but he’d served on various trading ships before acquiring his current vessel, The Sun Princess, a few years previously. He immediately renamed her Pelquin’s Comet, which said something about the man’s ego. He paid for the ship with his share of the bounty from a respectable but hardly record-breaking Elder hoard discovery, registered to the crew of The Silver Fish, the last ship he’d served on. A few brushes with the law, mostly relating to alcohol and brawling, and the suspicion of black-market artefact trading without anything ever being proved… In short, exactly what she might have expected and there was certainly nothing in the files to concern the bank. The aspect that puzzled her most was why he was coming to see her at all. The morning’s first applicant had his own resources, but this one had his own ship for crying out loud. So where did the bank fit in? Yet Pelquin’s record argued that he wasn’t an idiot and wasn’t likely to waste either his own time or hers. Enough prevaricating; the only way she was going to find out was by interviewing the man and
assessing this proposal.

  The sweep of a hand wiped away the information suspended before her.

  “Jay,” she spoke into the air, knowing that vocalising the name would ensure the words were heard by her secretary in the anteroom. “Send Captain Pelquin in, please.” At least this one appeared experienced enough not to try offering her Lenbya.

  She enjoyed watching people’s reactions when they met her for the first time, fully aware that most would suppose Terry Reese, banking executive, to be a man. Stepping forward to greet visitors as they entered rather than sitting back and having them come to her was another habit calculated to fly in the face of expectation.

  Pelquin proved to be shorter than she’d anticipated, less imposing. It was difficult to judge such things from file images, of course, which were rarely life-size. He was stocky though; powerfully built, with broad shoulders and a barrel chest, while his handshake was firm and strong and his eyes held the same intensity the pictures had conveyed.

  “Would you like a drink, coffee perhaps?”

  “Ehh… no. Thank you.”

  She led the way to where two chairs waited. Hers was a little grander than the visitor’s, higher-backed and more sumptuously padded, but the chairs faced each other at a jauntily skewed angle to avoid any sense of direct confrontation and no desk drew a demarcation line between them. Instead, a small table stood beside the larger chair, just enough to rest drinks or other small items on. The idea was to suggest to the subconscious that this was more in the nature of a cosy chat rather than the discussion of anything important.

  Terry sat and smiled at Pelquin. She had a feeling that this one wasn’t fooled for a moment.

  Terry Reese was proving a difficult so-and-so to read. Pelquin endeavoured to be at his most charming as he made the pitch, explaining how Nate Almont had approached him a year or so after leaving the crew of the Comet, conveniently avoiding mention of how acrimonious that parting had been. Nate brought with him a bona-fide Elder artefact accompanied by a harrowing tale of struggle and narrow escape.

  Pelquin could still see his friend now, exhausted and nervous, ready to jump at shadows. The two of them had been huddled in a booth at a crowded bar on some fringe world or other, their animosity forgotten. Nate had evidently been crew on a mining vessel, the Southern Cross, which had stumbled on a significant cache – the sort of thing that every trader and miner operating at the edge of human space dreamt of stumbling upon. Pelquin had no intention of acquainting Reese with the precise circumstances of its discovery; he didn’t doubt the bank would dissect this interview and pore over his every utterance in the hope of gleaning enough information to locate the site themselves. All was fair in war and cache hunting. Better to say too little than too much.

  The cache had proved to be warded by a fully alert guardian entity with a small arsenal of sophisticated defences at its disposal. Some of these the eager invaders bludgeoned their way through using mining equipment from their ship, others required a little more thought and subtlety, while the slightest miscalculation soon proved to be deadly. There had been nine aboard the Southern Cross. Only Nate and two others survived to reach the inner chamber, their shipmates having fallen one by one, picked off by the installation’s defences.

  Nate described the process as a sobering one. After the first death there had been heated debate about whether they should abandon the site and make do with selling knowledge of its location for a smaller return. Eventually avarice, thinly disguised within the excuse of ensuring their colleague’s death wouldn’t be an empty one, had won out. It became easier each time, until the excuses were worn away. There was nowhere for conscience to hide and by the time the surviving trio broke through they’d abandoned all pretence. Greed had brought them here, pure and simple.

  Of course, these were far from the terms Pelquin employed when describing events to Reese.

  That final chamber proved to be a vast storeroom. Nate had shown him some scratchy footage – relayed back to the ship from the suit cameras, the quality of the images compromised by the layers of Elder architecture and technology that lay between receptor and recorder.

  The brief clip showed a tantalising glimpse of a room piled high with all manner of Elder devices and trinkets; a perfect teaser, almost as if it had been designed that way, though Nate insisted otherwise.

  “These are the only images we came back with,” he’d explained. “Only wish there was more, but soon after we breached the chamber we were hit with some sort of EMP blast that wrecked a load of the power tools, fried our comms and cameras, and wiped the suitcams. This was all we could salvage.”

  Pelquin played the footage for Terry Reese. Surely, as a banker, she couldn’t help but be impressed by that? She watched impassively, and made a note in the air close to her face – sensitised space doubtless containing text visible to her but hidden from his perspective.

  Nor was he entirely open about what had happened subsequently. He told her frankly of the final manifestation of the guardian Nate and his colleagues encountered within that inner chamber, about how it had scared the living daylights out of them because this one seemed responsive, adapting to their actions rather than just passively performing pre-programmed tasks. They were rare, guardians that could do that. They were the truly dangerous ones. According to what Pelquin proceeded to tell Reese, this final defence had accounted for both the other spacers and Nate had barely escaped with his life, snatching up a single artefact as he fled – his only tangible proof that any of this was real.

  In fact, the way Nate had described events to him, two of them had escaped that chamber. Pelquin, however, reasoned that the bank wouldn’t want to hear about this, reckoning that his case would hardly be helped by the knowledge that he had a competitor. At least his key to the cache was still breathing.

  Both the survivors were determined to return to the installation – who wouldn’t with such a huge cache to exploit? Both knew they couldn’t do so alone, that they needed help, but they couldn’t agree who from. Nate had wanted to turn to the devil he knew: Pelquin, but the other argued that it would be better to approach a mining concern, people who would already have the necessary equipment and manpower on hand. In the end Nate relented, and they approached Jossyren, one of the larger fringe mining companies.

  This proved to be a costly mistake. They were double-crossed, Nate’s colleague was killed, and he only escaped by the skin of his teeth – for a second time. With nowhere else to go and the hired guns of a powerful corporation after his blood, Nate had taken the only option left to him, swallowing his pride and approaching his old buddy Pelquin for help.

  No, the bank definitely wouldn’t want to hear about any of this. Jossyren might be small in galactic terms but they were highly influential on the fringe worlds; a powerful enemy.

  So Pelquin presented a slightly abridged version of events to Terry Reese, one in which only Nate Almont had escaped the Elder installation. He did so smoothly and confidently. He was hardly a novice when it came to lying.

  “This has to be the biggest cache of Elder tech to be discovered in decades, perhaps the biggest ever, and I have on my crew the only man who knows where it is,” he concluded – exaggeration being an accepted part of the game. He then sat back, inviting Reese to comment.

  She nodded thoughtfully, and then said, “It’s a shame Mr Almont isn’t here with you.”

  “Nate’s not at his most comfortable in formal situations.” And trust me, right now you wouldn’t want to meet him, he thought but didn’t say.

  “Pity. Perhaps I could have a chat with him though, on another occasion.”

  “Perhaps.” Like hell.

  Had he overestimated his own powers of persuasion? Was he about to lose this because of Nate’s absence? Surely the woman could see the opportunity he was offering her?

  “So, to recap,” Reese said, “you’re not asking the bank to pay for the hire of a ship, since you already have one, but you are asking us to fund your purchas
e of a considerable amount of equipment, which you’ll utilise to reach this inner chamber where a significant number of Elder artefacts are stored.”

  “Precisely. Nate got out of there with the guardian entity still fully functional. It’ll have rebuilt the defences by now, maybe varied them and probably ensured they’re nastier than ever. We need to be prepared for any eventuality and I wouldn’t mind hiring one more crewmember – some of this equipment’s heavy.”

  “Not to mention expensive,” she observed, “judging by the amount you’re after.”

  He shrugged. “A lot of this is specialist stuff and will have to be made to order.”

  “Hmm… and how exactly did you arrive at this figure?”

  “All carefully calculated, I promise you.”

  “I’ll want to see a full breakdown.”

  “Naturally.” Pelquin struggled to suppress the thrill that coursed through him. If she was asking for figures, she’d bought into the concept already. The rest was just a matter of negotiation and bickering over the details.

  “And what are you proposing to offer First Solar in return for this investment?”

  Better and better – getting down to the nitty gritty already. “A legal charge over my ship, the Comet…”

  “…which is next to worthless if you renege on the loan and choose to remain at the fringe, where finding the ship, let alone seizing it, would be too costly a venture to prosecute.”

  “True, but who wants to eke out a living from the piddling scraps of trade you can pick up around the fringe? You’ve got my history on record. That’s not what I’m about. In addition, I’m offering a ten percent share in the profits made on all Elder artefacts we recover.”